Invariably one of our entertainments when we’re visiting cities during our travels is to seek out art of one or another, and usually several kinds. Of course we did this on our recent visits to Melbourne and Adelaide.

Melbourne’s National Gallery was in the final days of its hosting of a large Salvador Dali exhibition.

This was very popular and we had to queue for some time for tickets. The works on show represented a wide range of his work but we found that only a small number of them drew our interest. Of those, it was pieces of jewelery that i’d not been aware Dali had created, that most impressed and fascinated.

At the Ian Potter Centre there were some interesting pieces among the entrants in the 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award.

The Centre for the Moving Image was however, the place we spent most of our time with art this visit. acmi have an absorbing new exhibition of the history of the moving image, called Screen Worlds – lots and lots of detailed pieces on show and in action and many you can interact with, that build this story. We went back several times to revisit some of these. In another gallery is Hollywood Remix – several cheekily remixed sections of a few old Hollywood classics to put the characters and plots into new perspectives! But best of all a large retrospective of Len Lye’s work including several recreations of some of his brilliantly conceived kinetic sculptures – which we returned to watch several times.

More briefly experienced, but equally memorable and impressive was the furniture of Khai Liew. Our friends R & C took us to meet Khai Liew in his showroom while we were in Adelaide. Curiously we had seen 2 of his pieces in the city Art Gallery the previous afternoon, noting but really unaware of just who had crafted these chairs. Liew’s furniture is exquisitely fine — amongst his tables, chairs, chests, sideboards are designs i found myself at once regarding covetously. We could very quickly see just why he and his work have international standing.

The following day as R & C were showing us parts of the Adelaide hills, they took us to a furniture store housed in what had once been a small church — now with added modern extension. This place has a good selection of modern stuff but what captured C’s and my attention were some small pieces of glass. We liked them lots, but left them there, taking only photos. Later [after an excellent late lunch — well, it was mid-afternoon by then — at Melt Pizzeria, in a very pleasant corner of the city — great crisp pizza, salad, & some just brilliant mushrooms sautéd with rosemary & served with polenta] we visited the JamFactory. A design/production/exhibition/sale centre this clutch of studios serves to foster design and crafting in ceramics, glass, furniture and metal. There was some really interesting stuff in exhibition and here in the selling gallery we found some more of the series of glass pieces that had so caught us earlier in the day. We looked and looked and finally succumbed. [Thank you R & C for leading us to this temptation!]

Just the other day we discovered that the glass piece we bought, one of a series called Jelly Block, and made there at the JamFactory, by Kumiko Nakajima, was a finalist in this year’s Ranamok Prize. How pleasing!

[The piece we bought is the one on the left in the picture.]

We’ve recently been back in Australia – Melbourne and Adelaide – to visit friends and also just to indulge ourselves a little. First to Melbourne where we stayed with M & A in their recently acquired townhouse in Toorak. This is in a brilliant location adjoining a small park, a few minutes walk from train station and tram stop, and only a little further to Prahran Market and Chapel Street. After a few days we took ourselves off to Adelaide for the weekend where we spent much of our time in the company of friends R & C who very generously gave up their days to show us many of their favourite corners of Adelaide and its environs. Then we returned for another three days in Melbourne.

On the Saturday morning in Adelaide we breakfasted on croissant and coffee in the Central Market, while marveling at the range of foodstuffs available. We wandered away, just as we had done from Prahran Market a couple of days earlier, feeling regret and disappointment that Christchurch does not have the population to support a similar enterprise. Loving food as we do we would consider living a few minutes walk from a good produce market such as both these are, to be a kind of heaven. We enviously eyed amongst so much, the really fresh vegetables, the big range of breads, and the banks of flowers. There is of course lots of fine stuff to be had in Christchurch but not in one place or in such range; often not quite so fresh nor as cheap.

I’ve been re-reading Julian Barnes’ paean to Flaubert. Chapter 13, Pure Story, I particularly enjoyed. Which is odd since, thank the gods, i’ve not lost my lover, best friend, partner. But Barnes’ narrator here, strikes this reader as sane, insightful— ? — well, certainly entertaining in his examination, distillation and phrasing of our experience of life, and loss.

After the death of one’s love: first madness. “And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. … Mourning is of time; nothing but time. … And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands. … Other people think you want to talk. … Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don’t; it makes little difference. The words aren’t the right ones; or rather, the right words don’t exist.”

Despair. “After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.”

“Does life improve? … When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements — the invention of some new valve or sprocket — while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.”

“Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

We’ve seen some very enjoyable movies in the past couple of weeks.

Moon — see my earlier post.

Adventureland — coming of age in 1987 US — Jesse Eisenberg is excellent as the smart but naive literature student learning that love is painful.

Looking for Eric — Ken Loach’s cheering tender comedy in the gritty real world.

Mary & Max — a delightfully amusing claymation recreation of the true tale of the most odd couple — 8 year old suburban Australian Mary Daisy Dinkle and reclusive paranoid 44 year old jewish New Yorker Max Horovitz.

Limits of Control — am not sure how we’ve missed Jim Jarmusch before — this is surreal but beautifully filmed, well evoking aspects of Spain.

Departures — captivating — ‘beautifully performed character study’, ‘with grace and humanity’, ‘eloquent’.

Summer Hours — wonderfully affirming generosity of spirit.

John Chen with the T’ang Quartet play Schnittke Piano Quintet; Gao Ping Mei, Lan, Zhu, Ju; and Dvorˆák Piano Quintet.
The quintet played wonderfully these contrasting works — and that contrast was entertaining in itself. Gao Ping’s new work had a wonderful range of references and echos from West as well as East and is very fine. Having explained the origins for his inspiration in the 4 symbolic Chinese plants, plum blossom, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, and their characters, he then invited us to ignore all he’d said and let the music speak to us in whatever way we and it chose.

Christopher Herrick plays works by Bach, Brahms, Dupre, Hollins and Rinck.
We decided it was way beyond time that we actually heard the Town Hall organ! A terrible confession that we’d never heard it before now, it having been there only 10 years. These pieces were much varied selection — apt i guess for a Sunday afternoon concert. The organ is impressive of course, and now it would be great to hear a set of really fine and coherently chosen pieces.

Seraphine Pick, Ronnie van Hout, et al. at the Christchurch Art Gallery.
None of these shows lit our imaginative fires. Van Hout’s was the perhaps more entertaining — briefly. Disappointing.

Rafael Bonachela’s 360° for the Sydney Dance Company.
Wonderful. Simply, wonderful. That is the standard English phrase for something so good words can’t be found to do a just description, but really multiply wonderful might be more apt. We’ve only been in the right place at the right time once before to see the Sydney Dance Company. We know they are superlatively good. They were the first time we saw them. They are now. This is a stunningly good piece and the dancers’ moves astonishing, captivating and elating. 360° may be the best thing we experience in this festival.

Moon directed by Duncan Jones with Sam Rockwell.
This is the new must-see science fiction film. Jones’ superbly achieved debut movie has been a brilliant start for our viewings at this year’s International Film Festival. We’d read that Moon is being considered a worthy descendant of such great SF films as 2001 and Blade Runner. It is; though i have a long-time love of the 2 just mentioned and they remain in top place. That said, Moon is very, very good — wonderfully clever and pertinent story, impressive acting by Rockwell, with a set and cinematographic style that supports those elements perfectly.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mendelssohn’s incidental music.
Experiencing Felix Mendelssohn’s dedicated music for Shakespeare’s play was a rare and delightful treat to begin our festival experiences. Jonathan Elsom, in the guise of William Shakespeare and wearing the same costume he wore as Chorus in Henry V [which opened the James Hay Theatre rather more years back than we care to remember], masterfully linked the scenes in Elric Hooper’s cleverly abridged version of the Dream. The actors adeptly conjured a world of love — true and mistaken, thwarted and requited — on sweep of bare stage beneath projected swathes of forest and a great silver moon.

NZSO plays Debussy Prelude a LApres Midi d’un Faune, Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 2, & Shostakovich Symphony No 10.
First experience of a Shostakovich symphony live — powerful stuff of huge contrasts excellently performed with Mark Wigglesworth conducting. Alexander Melnikov wove again the magic of a great romantic concerto for the piano in the way i wrote of in an earlier post this year.

Once and for all we’re gonna tell you who we are so shut up and listen.
Very now, often loud [very loud], exuberantly young [adolescent], certainly different, and assuredly entertaining, contemporary theatre. And actually more show than tell — and so much more telling. Makes you kind of relieved not to have adolescent children of one’s own. This wildly energtic, messy and cleverly repetitively-structured piece from Belgium was great fun.

Today i finished reading The Angel’s Cut, Elizabeth Knox’s sequel to The Vintner’s Luck. It’s good, but for me not great like the story of Sobran and Xas. Others, reviewers, disagree with me.

What i think is missing in the new book are elements of a style the first volume possesses. A style that is perhaps mostly of time and place as conjured by Knox’s ability with words: style that came from the yearly structure, from varied chapter lengths, and from France in the 1800s which lends the story a degree of unfamilar romance. Other aspects of this style are generated from the presence of the vintners and the wine-making tradition, from the meeting of paysan and noble, both earthly and celestial, and from the sheer imaginative leap of a story that tells the love affair of a man and an angel.

The new book’s setting in 1930s Hollywood should have been capable of generating a similar romance of time and place but i was disappointed; it seemed, instead, tawdry. Maybe that was the point. Yet i wanted Xas to retain his nobility whereas he increasingly tended to appear as “people”; and Lucifer should never have had to resort to the telephone. In spite of the lesser stature of the story, Knox still captured my attention and entertained me. The Angel’s Cut has many good moments because she writes so well; there is much pleasing invention and historical connection, much finely observed detail and more celestial revelation: eventful and philosophical.  So it’s a good book, just not the best.

I am very grateful Elizabeth Knox introduced us to Xas; it has been a delight to be told some of his history, however my hope now is that she will be content to let him be, to go, henceforth, unrecorded.

Winter’s a good time for a film festival. Out Takes, the gay film festival has been back in town this past week. A small festival but amongst the limited screenings we’ve seen several pleasing films.

The German farce, Fashion Victims, was fun if a little slow and in need of some sharpening. Karsten’s coming out was real, nicely judged, with he and Steven making a pleasing pair amongst the farcical goings on they get caught up in.

Shelter is a fine movie with a good deal of excellent acting to render a well constructed story. We hugely admired this film.

However the award for greatest pleasure goes to Were the World Mine. This is a totally delightful fantasy. Shakespeare well knew how to rework an old story to greater stature and quality, and while Were the World is not his Dream wholly reworked it is a splendid interpretation of Puck in small town USA 21st century style. Timothy’s situation is not so uncommon but his mastery of song, gorgeous voice [the face is pretty damn fine as well] and his proper good luck dispensing the love juice with his football-team classmates [especially his liaison with Nat], make for a most uncommon and very satisfying entertainment. The Elizabethans knew they were on to a good thing with their notion of ‘overgoing’ as the appropriate driving principle for artistic creation. This overdone version of the fairy sub-plot from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is such stuff as dreams were made on: long may it be so.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero · The Tempest

This afternoon we saw the film The Reader.

See it.

It’s very good, very powerful.